In the past decade, Government officials in the United States have expressed heightened concern over the threat posed by weapons of mass destruction and the country's vulnerability to an attack on its own soil. In 1996, Congress passed the Defense Against Weapons of Mass Destruction Act, which designated the Department of Defense as lead agency for responding to an attack by terrorists using chemical or biological hazards. As a result of this law, known as the Nunn-Lugar-Domenici Act, the Defense Department created the Domestic Preparedness Program to train local and state officials most likely to be first responders in the event of such an attack. First responders must make rapid decisions in life-saving and life-threatening situations. Prior to dealing with an actual terrorist incident involving suspected or known chemical-biological hazards, these personnel must be adequately trained to properly react to the various types of hazardous events, for both their safety as well as public safety. This program, now under the Justice Department as lead agency, requires improved technologies and practices to deal with the threat posed by weapons of mass destruction.
The integration of diverse functional elements such as medical and decontamination specialists, hazardous material teams, and explosive ordnance disposal teams, requires substantial planning, coordination and practice. The challenges posed by the dependency and interdependency of multiple operational functions such as these are discussed in several public documents and become apparent when realistic exercises are conducted for first responders. There is clearly a need to integrate these functional elements in order to respond adequately to a terrorist threat or incident. The current documentation and training curricula on this subject are singularly structured to the point of being “stove-piped.” For example, decontamination processes and physical protection requirements are generally taught as independent functions. In practice, however, these processes are integrally linked. Decontamination cannot be performed without physical protection, while physical protection requirements are dependent on decontamination actions. The need exists for a tool that tactically relates these functional elements and is responsive to rapidly changing information as responders assess a situation.
Current decision support and training systems for the military include training courses in chemical, biological, and radiological defense, and are directly supported by doctrine such as Field Manuals and Technical Manuals. Detection, decontamination, physical protection equipment and the like are treated as separate and static subjects. Given this, the incident commander must rapidly process information during a hazardous incident and make the appropriate decisions for action based upon his own cognitive abilities to mentally process such information with or without the help of subordinates. Although Training Manuals and Field Manuals may be available, timely access and processing of this information remains elusive, and decisions made on this less-than-optimal information may prove detrimental.
The current civilian decision support and training systems suffer from similar problems. Tactical training is provided to emergency medical technicians, hazardous material technicians, bomb technicians, law enforcement personnel, fire and rescue personnel, and healthcare providers. Specific policy and statutory guidelines are provided in the Code of Federal Regulations to regulate occupational workplace exposure to hazardous materials. From these guidelines, emergency training modules have been developed and are presented at the local, state and federal levels. These courses, too, are presented in modular fashion and are generally taught as independent functional activities. Without better decision aids, the incident commander in a mass casualty incident involving chemical, biological or radiological hazards is likely to become overwhelmed with the large amounts of complicated data that must be processed in a short period of time.
Finally, the current numerical models that perform calculations based on physical transport physics are helpful and can be integrated into the present invention, but as stand-alone models do not adequately support the difficult decisions that the incident commander must make in the event of a genuine incident. These models may even confuse matters for the incident commander faced with a mass of independent and often conflicting data.
What is needed is a computer-based, integrated and multidisciplinary approach that allows for linguistic and numerical range input, provides one or more embedded hazardous assessment models that treat time as a variable to track, includes memory and decision aids, and allows for a training overlay that utilizes the same core algorithms as would be used in an actual hazardous incident.